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Arrival in Ecuador

Last year, PR and I took 4 flights to travel to Quito, Ecuador. We passed by Taipei, Los Angeles, Mexico and Panama.

At the Los Angeles airport, we were told that the pilot couldn’t make it, at the last minute, to fly the plane and we were asked to take a later plane to Mexico.

When we arrived at Mexico, we missed our flight to Panama due to the extremely long queue to cross the customs (or perhaps we queued in the wrong line. 5 different personnel gave us 3 different answers as to which queue we just be in. All were just as long anyway…). By the time we got out of customs and came back, we realised the boarding gate was at the other side of the airport. So, we missed our flight and had to change our tickets to a later plane.

When we reached Panama, we were already suffering from jet lag and PR had a serious flu due to the lack of proper rest.

Our final flight landed us at Guayaquil of Ecuador instead of Quito due to poor visibilty at the airport in Quito. We stayed overnight in Guayaquil and travelled to Quito in the next morning.

By the time we reached Quito, Ecuador, we realised that ALL our luggages were lost in the midst of transits. It was an experience indeed. In Spanish, our friend here in Ecuador said it’s “Todo que pudieron haber salido mal, salió mal” which means, “Everything that could go wrong, went wrong”. It was indeed an experience. Heh. Thank God we managed to claim insurance for almost everything, and we had a good stay at Hilton in Guayaquil.. free of charge!

This year, everything went smoothly.🙂

We spent a week in Los Angeles with my brother and his lovely wife and cute 2-year-old son. It was a great time. We got to know them better (They’ve been staying in LA for approximately 8 years), caught up with my secondary school friend whose working in LA and visited lots of places. We went to Universal Studios, Disneyland, Grand Canyon, Las Vegas and Santa Monica beach. PR has more comments about these places we visited. We’ll talk about them in another post with the photos uploaded.🙂

After the week’s stay in LA, we got over the jet lag rather quickly and then travelled to Quito. Just two flights. We have ALL 4 of our luggages with us! Praise the Lord! And this time our insurance did not cover the flights from LA to Quito! (Most travel insurance only covers the flights till your first destination, which for us, is LA.) God protected us and our luggage. We’re healthy here, no flu bugs, no jet lag and no altitude sickness, though Quito is approximately 2.8km above sea level. Amen!

We went to MFA with the school’s director today to do our visas. It should be ready in 2 days’ time. Everything’s been extremely smooth so far.🙂 But we’ll keep praying for this till we really get our hands on them. Other time has been spent catching up with WL and WP, finding out more about Ecuador, lifestyles, the church, and etc. Their advice is that we focus on 2 things: Spanish and building relationships.

Tomorrow we’re starting our first Spanish lesson here, 1 hour a day, 5 times a week. Pray for us that the Lord will anoint us linguistically! We’ll also be sitting in the shepherdings and caregroup this week to get to know the people. Pray that with our limited spanish at the moment, we’ll be able to at least connect with some of them.. haha..